The devil’s gold

“The devil’s gold” names Sicilian sulfur and the promise and cost of exploiting it. The phrase first presents the mineral as a source of wealth, then exposes a stark imbalance: sulfur sustains commerce, employment, and European industry, yet the book emphasizes that the resulting prosperity does not reach Sicily in the same way. It belongs to a wider account in which commodities move through long supply chains, while control of transport, markets, and profit remains uneven.

The phrase and its setting

The book introduces sulfur by its Sicilian name, u’ sùrfaru, and calls it both “The devil’s gold” and “The accursed wealth of merchants.” These names place the commodity between promise and danger. Sulfur is a form of wealth, but not an uncomplicated gift: the landowners’ sudden access to it follows centuries of resentment toward deposits that left the soil barren and unsuitable for pasture because of their fumes.

That reversal matters to the expression’s force. What had seemed to make the ground worthless becomes something merchants can sell. The phrase does not treat wealth as a simple measure of the island’s good fortune; it points instead to a resource whose value depends on extraction, trade, and who controls the proceeds.

Extraction, labor, and trade

Sulfur’s transformation into marketable wealth begins underground. Men and children work through winding corridors, carrying baskets of yellow stone to the surface. The clods are weighed, packed into sacks, and sent abroad. The image of workers lining up like ants gives the operation a collective, repetitive scale, while the reference to their burdened backs makes clear that production depends on strenuous labor.

The trade extends far beyond the mines. Sulfur leaves Sicily for France, Britain, and northern Italy, with Britain guaranteed the lion’s share of production. The island is therefore a source of the commodity, but the routes and destinations connect its extraction to external markets. The mineral’s journey echoes the book’s broader depiction of commerce: spices, for example, pass through many hands and travel overland and by sea before reaching European ports, with costs rising at each stage. In both cases, the value of a commodity is shaped by movement and exchange, not merely by its place of origin.

Industrial value and unequal returns

In Europe, sulfur is burned in a lead room and converted, through heat and steam, into oil of vitriol, or sulfuric acid. That product serves the manufacture of dyes and the processes of chemical factories emerging across Europe. The book thus traces the commodity beyond its extraction, showing how Sicilian mineral wealth becomes an industrial input elsewhere.

The account names the contradiction directly: “The devil’s gold makes you rich. It creates well-being and jobs,” but “Everywhere. Except in Sicily.” The language distinguishes the wealth generated along the commodity chain from the prosperity experienced where the raw material is extracted. Sicily supplies sulfur to European industry, yet the benefits described accrue elsewhere. The final qualification—that not all Sicilians recognize this—makes the disparity not only an economic condition but also a matter of political and social awareness.

A recurring image of wealth

The phrase’s significance reaches beyond the sulfur passage. Later, Vincenzo thinks of his work through a catalogue of commodities and enterprises: the sea and ships, tuna and sumac, sulfur and silk, spices, and Casa Florio itself. Sulfur appears within this inventory not as an isolated curiosity but as one element in the commercial world through which the Florios build their position.

The sulfur episode gives that world a sharper edge. The Florios’ business depends on goods moving through networks of supply, storage, and sale; their warehouse at Palazzo Steri holds spices in transit or awaiting merchants, while duties are paid when goods actually enter Palermo. These details show how trade can be organized to manage costs and capture opportunity. Against this commercial ingenuity, “The devil’s gold” draws attention to another side of exchange: a region may provide the labor and natural resource yet remain outside the wider distribution of the resulting prosperity.

As an expression, “The devil’s gold” holds those meanings together without resolving them. Sulfur is valuable precisely because it can be extracted, transported, and transformed, but its value carries the history of degraded land, arduous work, and unequal returns. The phrase makes the commodity’s wealth visible while refusing to equate commercial success with shared well-being.